Schizophrenia, Modernity and ‘Primitivism’: Emergence of a Global Diagnosis

Abstract The article explores how schizophrenia was transformed into a globally viable, cross-cultural diagnosis. It zooms in on reconceptualizations of schizophrenia in the second half of the 20th century in order to examine the relationship between psychiatry, modernity, and ideas of backwardness (‘primitivism’). At this time, schizophrenia became a unique site for redrawing cross-cultural and international boundaries, and for understanding the decolonizing world and its rapid transformations. It also provided an opportunity for leading Western psychiatrists to reimagine their own relationship to the decolonizing world, and re-examine their colonial predecessors’ understanding of this world’s core social, cultural, and clinical characteristics. In an important way, the schizophrenia and culture debate became one of the foundational research fields of the new post-colonial discipline of transcultural psychiatry and its universalist paradigm, but struggled with many of its internal contradictions and incoherences: its lingering racial hierarchies and evolutionary thinking, and its tendency to understand ‘culture’ in a narrow and reductive way.